Here’s the three things I’d care about in a GNOME scripting environment a lot:

The most important thing is of course the bindability. You need to make it incredibly simple to bind stuff to or from GObject stuff. It looks like GScript already does an awesome job at this with natively marshalling everything and so on.

Another important thing is this: Does GScript ship programming tools and provide a way to do RAD? I’m thinking console, debugger, dnd script installation etc here. Not just for people writing scripts (where I’d want completion and built-in documentation), but also for me when making my application scriptable and having to debug refcounting issues because a script holds on to a GObject that my C code thinks is gone already.

But the most important thing for scripting I think is security. I want to be able to download scripts from untrusted sources (read: the Internet) without fear of them doing anything bad to my computer or its data. This is doubly complicated if exposing stuff is too easy. So if you expose “RemoveSong” in Rhythmbox, you already have a problem.
The reason you want to allow this, is twofold: 1) We are incredibly bad at maintaining a useful set of plugins (or art - same issue for themes). That’s not due to lack of capability, but because it’s booooring. 2) If you would set up a website where everyone can upload/download/vote on scripts and even integrated that site into your application, you would make the application self-improve and lower the barrier of entry for new people incredibly.
Here’s a use example

I want to remove red eyes in the GIMP. So I open the plugin browser, enter “red eye” and get a list of plugins (note that none of these plugins are installed). I select the highest-rated (or most-installed one) and it launches, asking me to select the red eyes and afterwards removes it.

I decide I’m smart and can write code that detects the red eyes automatically, so I select the script, click on “edit” and modify the script. After half an hour (read: 2 weeks) it does what I want. I’m happy.

When looking through my scripts, I see the “upload” button next to my red-eye removal tool. So I click it and it’s available for everyone else.

Go to 1, replace “I” with “you” and “selecting the area” with “speed”, “accuracy” or whatever other feature.

This gets you the whole bazaar style software evolution without human intervention, automatically and for free. The only people I know that are doing something like this are Userscripts for Greasemonkey, but even that doesn’t look very professional.

Yesterday, when reading the Tracemonkey stuff, I realized this. The question “My code runs slow, how to make it go fast?” has two answers: “Improve the compiler/runtime to make it go fast.” and “Rewrite it in another language that can go fast.” As long as the second option is possible, there’s just no need to spend a huge amount of brain on the other option.

Besides, I’m back from my holidays where I’ve played with Flash 9 scripting in Swfdec. While it won’t make it for Swfdec 0.8, I’m positive 0.10 will play ABC-scripted Flash.

Yay, I’ll be on holidays on Madeira for the next 3 weeks. So if I don’t answer to email, now you know why. (I didn’t break the GNOME build on pourpose, I swear!)

To not leave you without code to break, I did releases of Swfdec: 0.6.8 (stable) and 0.7.4 (unstable) with corresponding swfdec-mozilla and swfdec-gnome releases.

Last but not least, I also uploaded the slides for the talk I gave at LugRadio Live and GUADEC. Of course it’s a Flash file. Navigate using space, left and right arrow. Mouse click (un)fullscreens. Flash is a pretty great presentation creation framework, especially because everybody can just watch the presentation in the browser the same way I did it.

It’s sad when all we have to offer to sexually frustrated people is hate and social exclusion. I’ve started to wonder if the bad reputation of Open Source communities is more related to their unsympathetic behavior than to their photos.

I’m looking for accomodation at LugRadio Live, for 3 nights: arriving on Friday leaving on Monday. So if that sounds interesting to you, and you’re not scared of sharing a room with people that know too much about Flash, get in contact.

I finally made it! Swfdec 0.7.2 is out in the wild. And now I don’t know what to blog about, because I haven’t used the stable series for such a long time that I don’t even know what the coolest new features are. I had to read the git log for half an hour to remind myself of what we’ve done in the last 3 months.

The coolest thing for me about Swfdec development was when Youtube released their new player and it just worked. But it also works in the stable release, so for end users that’s boring. What I also found cool was the time we invested into our (de)compilation framework that gets used internally to make Flash files easier to debug. We spent a lot of time on it and now have a vivi-rewrite tool, that can do all sorts of interesting things to Flash files (like remove randomness). And again, it’s a feature that I think is very cool, but it’s absolutely uninteresting for end users.

But there are some user-visible features. Swfdec does fullscreen properly now. That’s good for 3 things. First, it’s awesome to watch videos in fullscreen. When hey are fast enough. That’s the second thing: It’s easy to figure out if your X driver setup has Xrender properly accelerated. Because if you have a stuttering video, it isn’t. And last but not least I hope that these weird guys want to watch videos in fullscreen and therefore accelerate render properly.

I’ve long since thought that this line of thinking, that apparently quite a few companies believe in, is wrong: “Hey, we have contributed lots of money to your cause, now we must have something to say!” I’m sorry, but that is wrong. There’s a reason why it’s called the open source community, not the open source stock exchange.

How much you have to say depends entirely on how much respect you have with your peers. And of course, you can be respected differently depending on topic. There’s a reason why some people are role models when it comes to technicalopinion, but not when it comes to licensingquestions. And for others this is different again.

So to wrap it up: If Nokia comes along and tells that they have contributed lots of code, I might expect Nokia to have technical know-how. If it also tells me I need to accept closed source, I will not trust it with leadership. So Nokia, I’ll be very happy to work with your engineers.